Totalitarian regimes in Europe and music: hronicles of confrontation

Abstract

The article analyses the relationship between artists and the totalitarian regimes that prevailed in Italy, Germany, and Ukraine in the twentieth century. The relevance of the topic is due to the need for a deep study of the processes that took place in the field of art in the twentieth century, since this era is characterised by close interconnections of artistic research with certain philosophical, aesthetic, and ideological systems. Musical life reflected the social processes that took place in different locations in Europe during that period, including the principles of neo-myth-making inherent in totalitarian ideologies. The mythologisation of mass consciousness required complete submission from art. Not all famous musicians were able to openly oppose the ideology of totalitarian regimes, as they felt an immediate danger to their own lives. The fascist and soviet regimes demonstrated all kinds of punitive systems in the face of disobedience and deviation of the artist's work from the general vector of artistic life - from doom to oblivion to complete moral and physical destruction.

Based on existing studies by foreign and domestic scholars, the authors of the article aim to recreate the events of the creative life of famous artists in the context of their complex relationships with the authorities and confrontation with totalitarian regimes of the 1920s-1950s. Recreating such chronicles is a necessary component in creating a systematic view of the role of the artist in the sociocultural continuum.

The complex and ambiguous relations with the authorities are examined on the example of the creative life of composers P. Hindemith and B. Martinů, conductors W. Furtwängler, H. von Karajan, O. Klemperer and A. Toscanini. Some of them took a position of outright opposition to the regime (A. Toscanini), others - of collaboration with it (H. von Karajan), and some made constant attempts to manoeuvre between their own conscience and the need to express support for the regime. Understanding the actions of each individual artist in the complex socio-cultural situation of the totalitarian regime is possible only if the specifics of social psychology and national culture are taken into account, which further requires an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the problem. Understanding the actions of each individual artist in the complex socio-cultural situation of the totalitarian regime is possible only if the specifics of social psychology and national culture are taken into account, which further requires an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the problem.